C2Cloud: A cloud computing framework

To compete in this global economy, organizations must be able to produce results in a timely manner. Because of this global economy, one needs to have some experience in developing distributed applications. Distributed programming may not be a required course, especially in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Therefore, recent graduates may find the job market challenging without some experience in developing these types of applications. This paper presents the cloud computing framework (C2Cloud). C2Cloud is a light weight framework that can be used to teach cloud services development. This framework adheres to the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm. That is, users are provided an interface to access services that are running in the cloud. C2Cloud service messages are formatted using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). This paper shows how C2Cloud can be used in an interdisciplinary capstone course to teach cloud computing. In particular, a Student Information System is developed using C2Cloud.